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sicariusdracus writes to tell us that Ron Hovsepian, the new president and COO of Novell may have his hands full in the near future. Ron has been tasked with getting the troubled business back on track which many have speculated could result in more than 20% of the 5,800 man workforce getting a pink slip (although Hovsepian suggests that may be an over exaggeration). Part of the restructuring will be announced with Novell's fourth-quarter financial results.

From the article: "The layoffs will be more about resource allocation,"

Enough with this PC stuff. Why can't they just say, something like, "We don't have the budget to sustain 5800 salarys, so we're laying off X people."? There is something to be said for Candor from executives.

Yes $7/share is pretty tempting, but Novel's stock will only go up if they start being profitable. Novel had it coming to them when they bought Ximian, a gnome vendor that made a hodge podge of different products that are now dead (remember RedCarpet?). Novel should stick to SUSE/KDE and re-orient all its developers towards improving _only one_ application for each particular need (ie. YAST for installation/maintenance, KDE for desktop, etc).

Novel's premier Linux distribution, SUSE, is historically based on KDE yet the individual projects that they're supporting (Beagle, Evolution) are gnome apps. I think in the long run KDE will become the de-facto standard primarily because of the tight integration among its applications and excitement in its developer and user base about KDE 4. If you don't believe me, take a look at how many more posts there are in KDE-Look [kde-look.org] than in Gnome-Look [gnome-look.org]. In fact, there is KDE-Apps [kde-apps.org] for independent apps built with the KDE/QT framework, while there is no such place to aggregate gnome apps.

In conclusion, Novel should get their gnome developers to work on KDE so that they have a tightly integrated system with no duplicated functionality.

Rebranded//and// extended. ZLM7 [novell.com] is much improved over Red Carpet Enterprise 2 and the first releases of ZENworks Linux Management.
I know you (maw) know this - just posting for the slashdot record.:)

EPS (ttm)=0.92 means that their Earnings Per Share for the Trailing Twelve Months was 92 cents a share. On a $7.47 share price (when I looked at the link, above), that's about 12% Earnings return on the share price (or a PE Ratio of 8.08).

That's really not a horrible return. Not great, but not bad, considering some tech companies LOSE money. It's only as high as it is because the stock price is beaten down so badly. Of course, you need to consider FUTURE earnings, not past, when buying a stock.

I'm no stock guru, but I do have what most would consider a sizeable portfolio, and I am in Novell at just over $6 (full disclosure here) for a few grand. So, yes, if I could encourage buying without touting the stock, I would. But I can't; that might be illegal.

... excitement in its developer and user base about KDE 4. If you don't believe me, take a look at how many more posts there are in KDE-Look than in Gnome-Look.

This is just wrong. Yeah, the two sites you mention have similar names. But unless you can come up with a damn good reason of how they both are representative of the "excitement of its developer and user base" of KDE and Gnome, you're just astroturfing for mindshare.

I used to do KDE development (need to get back to it), and I have no desire to see only one desktop out there. Yeah, Sun (and some of the old *nix world) would like see a single desktop. But that comes from the fear of what happened in the *nix world. But the real problem was not that there were parallel projects, but that they did not cooperate. The real battle was dominately between HP and Sun. They both wanted to win. So they each offered up desktops that differed and did not use similar conf. files. Lik

Novel's premier Linux distribution, SUSE, is historically based on KDE yet the individual projects that they're supporting (Beagle, Evolution) are gnome apps. I think in the long run KDE will become the de-facto standard primarily because of the tight integration among its applications and excitement in its developer and user base about KDE 4. If you don't believe me, take a look at how many more posts there are in KDE-Look than in Gnome-Look. In fact, there is KDE-Apps for independent apps built with the K

Red Carpet lives and breathes as ZENworks Linux Management.
In fact//I// have posted a few times on Slashdot about that transition.
The Red Carpet - now ZENworks Linux Management [novell.com] - engineering team are alive and well and working on the next release of the ZENworks Linux Management product line.
[As an aside - I know Slashdot is renowned for the innacuracy of posts - but this one just seems steeped in Gnome/KDE politics... Gnome, KDE - I really don't care so long as it's not the Win32 Shell...]

The more serious issues of your post being already discussed by other people, I'll just point out one ridiculous claim:In fact, there is KDE-Apps for independent apps built with the KDE/QT framework, while there is no such place to aggregate gnome apps.

Apart from the fact that the relevance of this is obscure to me, I have to wonder how you did your research... You could have typed "gnome-apps.org" and find a site with GNOME apps. Or you could have searched for "gnome apps" in Google, the 4th result has a q

you pretty much can't make money by selling the software itself under the gpl because as soon as a few copies are out there someone is bound to start redistributing it either free or for a lower charge than you and you will have no recourse because you put the software under the GPL.

sure you can sell support but thats only feasible with certain types of software

Err actually, the stock has been downgraded by several investment firms. Its expected drop a bit further even with the restructure. This will be like the 7th restructuring Novell has done in a little over a decade, if this doesn't pan out I don't think anyone will want their stock.Regards,Steve

In other news, 1160 ex-Novell employees said to be raising capital for hostile takeover of Krispy Kreme donut franchises, said to be interested in realigning business model with.torrent releases targeted directly at the Japanese pr0n market.

Finally in business news, Fuller Brush Company stock is up 50% on the day. A spokesperson for Fuller Brush Company said that despite initial concerns about the Slashdotting of their

Meanwhile, those of us in the real world use words like "fired", "laid-off", "redundant". I can see why their market research indicated a change was required. It's like rebranding "cancer" as "closure".

I'm seriously amazed at how stupid some people could be adopting Microsoft's technology instead of leveraging other open source technologies.

The combination of ECMA C# and Gtk# is 100% open source technologies, and that is what open source applications are built on.

You don't have to worry about the Microsoft aspects of C#--those are part of Novell's business plan. I'm sure their lawyers have done their homework and weighed the risks. But even if they got it wrong, it has no influence on the open source pa

But I still worry about the possiblity of some of the technology being covered, either under a submarine patent (although I suppose at this late date this is extremely unlikely), or under a published patent where the applicability to the C# technology is not obvious to anybody but some devious Microsoft strategist. It may border on the paranoid now, but I can't help it. I know Microsoft is a brutal competitor, and I don't think they're beyond doing such a thin

I think there should be a law that no patent can be enforced against users of a standard, if the patent holder proposed adding infringing features to that standard without (a) making it clear their proposal includes patented technology and (b) announcing their intention to charge license fees for their technology. In that case, I'd be wholeheartedly behind mono.

That's what standards bodies like ECMA and ISO are for--they require specific procedures and disclosures when it comes to patents. Microsoft went through this, so we know they are committed to being compliant with ECMA and ISO regulations when it comes to patents and intellectual property. Sun chickened out when faced with this--they withdrew their standards body submissions over ECMA, ANSI, and ISO's requirements for disclosure and openness.

But I still worry about the possiblity of some of the technology being covered, either under a submarine patent (although I suppose at this late date this is extremely unlikely), or under a published patent where the applicability to the C# technology is not obvious to anybody but some devious Microsoft strategist. It may border on the paranoid now, but I can't help it. I know Microsoft is a brutal competitor, and I don't think they're beyond doing such a thing if they can get away with it.

The fact that there is a connection between Mono and Microsoft, however slight, doesn't make me happy either. But, in the end, what's the worst that's going to happen?

First of all, Microsoft can't claim willful infringement if people don't know about the patent, so there wouldn't be any penalties. And what damages are they going to claim? And damages are usually based on revenue, but who derives revenue from shipping Mono commercially?

If Microsoft were to assert a patent claim, people would work around it within a few weeks and the matter would be closed; it is implausible that any judge would even waste time looking at the matter after that.

Also, FOSS must be violating lots of Microsoft patents, at least on paper: the Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla, etc. From a purely practical point of view, Microsoft must have done the calculation and decided that it simply isn't worth doing anything about it..NET is an unlikely place for them to start sueing. If they wanted to hurt FOSS, they'd go after the Linux kernel or Apache.

There are several so-called FOSS supporters that have licenses and intellectual property that constitutes a much bigger risk to the FOSS community than anything Microsoft has. Microsoft and Mono just isn't high on my list of worries.

Our company does, we have 23 severs running Netware and GroupWise, in our company. They are great file and print servers with great directory services. We only have three employees managing all the servers and all helpdesk calls for 350 people.

Our company does, we have 23 severs running Netware and GroupWise, in our company. They are great file and print servers with great directory services. We only have three employees managing all the servers and all helpdesk calls for 350 people.

They are still big among enterprises that value reliability and ease of use for large directories. I work in local goverment and it is our central store of identity and authentication for 12,000 users, as well as distributing applications and hosting files. Netware 6.5 provides great resources for Identity Management. Many goverment and educational sites use Netware, maybe because they typically don't have a lot of money for staff and need something that isn't labor intensive or prone to failure.

We have never had server downtime because of a virus or worm.

Novell's marketing seems to be the only weakness, the products are great.

Their hope of the future is migrating all their existing features to run over Linux.

Novell's marketing seems to be the only weakness, the products are great.

As a consultant dealing with several NetWare LANs, I've gotta ask what you're smoking, and why aren't you sharing?

Do me a favor, tell me the checkboxes I can click to install NW6.5 to get a fully running, usable server installed without twiddling any text files. File sharing is easy enough, but I want iPrint, iFolder, NetStorage, and Virtual Office (and no, installing on SYS: doesn't make it usable). I'd even settle for a nice GUI

We do. I don't remember what our employee count is, exactly, but it's quite a bit over 15,000. As others have said, great for file, print, email, and directory services. Novell's eDirectory (formerly NDS) is the most mature, stable, and powerful directory service package out there. Their clustering and SAN solutions are also quite excellent. Novell's Linux products aren't ready for prime time, yet, but they're coming along. By the time Netware 7 is out (_all_ Suse under the hood), the Novell Linux Des

Novell's old products are great. But their sales force sucks beyond belief. They are one of the few companies where you have to defeat their sales force to get them to sell you anything.

And you had better know exactly what you want because they're not going to offer any advice.

The only time you'll see/hear a Novell rep is when a tech support company goes cruising for clients. The Novell reps love to be driven around to see customers that they wouldn't ever call on their own.

I could double Novell's sales with nothing more than a two line phone and an email account. Seriously. Microsoft takes executives from potential clients to expensive dinners. Novell won't even waste a phone call on an existing customer. They won't even let you know when new products come out that could fit with the stuff they have on record that they sold you.

Well put. I'd mod this up Informative rather than Interesting because I've seen the same thing. The products are decent enough, but getting our Novell rep to actually give us information or a demo of their software is like pulling teeth. They can't even accurately describe to you what their software is supposed to do. It's a research excercise to figure out if their solution fits your problem.

We've got a Novell moron that shows up at our (large) university once in a while to present to all the techni

I think you'd be surprised who uses Netware and it's services.
I work for IDC, International Data Corporation. We use Netware and Suse in most of the 47 countries we have offices in. I used to work in the corporate headquarters in the US where we have Netware 5.x and 6.x file/print/services servers in all the offices. They mostly run for over a year or more between reboots. Those are usually for service packs and rarely for abends. Netware/eDirectory is very low on the scale of adminstrative burden and it allows us to manage the network and desktops for 750+ users in 7 offices across the States with only 2 full time desktop support staff and 2 admins who also take care of many other systems. Most of our sites with 10 to 50 people don't have a local admin and run quite happily. Novell's ZenWorks is phenomenal for remote application delivery, imaging, remote control and inventory for the desktop.
I moved to Australia in May to bring IDC AP over to Novell services, running on the Linux kernel with OES. It's a slow process getting the entire region ready for the change. So far I have our New Zealand office migrated and the Sydney office is very soon to follow and some of our services in Australia are already on Netware. Since I got here I've had to manage two Windows domains and though I started with NT domains many years ago I feel like I've got an arm tied behind my back administering the Windows networks, services and users. Things that are so painless with Netware are either difficult or not possible with NT domains. I've been so spoiled with Netware I can't wait to be rid of the domains!
Active Directory is better than NT, but from what I've seen (it's in a few of our offices over here), it's not nearly as fully featured as the far more mature Novell eDirectory product.
Our current Netware sites will gradually migrates to Open Enterprise Server runnin on the SLES Linux kernel and many of our core services are running on Linux. If it wasn't for vendors who only roll out applications only for Windows machines - Patchlink, ePo, etc, we wouldn't have any Windows servers.
I agree with an earlier post that Novell's marketing efforts have always been their downfall. It's too bad really, because it is such a superior product to choice of the huddled masses.

Jack Messman says Novell now has two primary businesses: identity management and open source. That's the business Novell wants to go after, anyway. I think it has a decent amount of what you call legacy-support business as well, but it's constantly shrinking.

Identity management is a pretty hot area right now and a lot of companies want a piece of it, including the big guys like IBM and Sun. Novell remains a leader, however, largely because it has a superior directory product.

I wrote an article profiling Novell [infoworld.com] and it's current business prospects last year. It still pretty much holds. Try to look past the fact that it quotes Laura DiDio -- before joining the ranks of the "notorious foes of Linux," she covered Novell for years and years.

The latest news is that Novell's shareholders have been pressuring it to focus more and more on Linux and open source. I'm not sure that's necessarily the best move, because I don't think Suse Linux is generating all that much revenue so far. The open source angle seems to be perceived as the "sexiest" way to go forward, however, with the hope of reviving the Novell brand.

My university uses Novel for the non-engineering and non-compsci portion of the student body user accounts. Not sure why, except htat perhaps it is easier/cheaper to use Novel with them, since they don't need access to the suite of tools that the engr/csci people do (Pro-E, Matlab, Mathcad, all that kinda jazz)

Will Ron Hovsepian be different than many other high powered COO's in the long run? What if he fails to resurect Novell, he will be paid either handsomely as a saviour or bid adieu with a seperation package. Either way he will be far better than the pink slip recipients. It's never about the little guy when stockholders are involved. Even when those laid off deserved to be.

I dont see why this story wouldn't get posted.Everyone, including the financial backers, approve of the purchase of SuSE and agree with the strategy Novell is trying to implement. The problem is that they dont have faith in the executive management team to implement the plan successfully. They arent looking to scrap the company's migration to linux. They're looking at whether they should get a new management team to finish implementing the plan, or give the current management more time.

Novell didn't "trip over its Linux strategy". Novell's primary product, Netware, was dead when Microsoft finally incorporated equivalent functionality into Windows. That's what the company "tripped over". Novell was essentially dead before they started doing anything with Linux. I find it amazing that they have managed to stay so relevant and important, and their acquisitions of SuSE and their support of Mono look like excellent ideas.

There is no way that their move into Linux was ever going to keep them going at their past levels. That's neither surprising, nor is it Linux's fault. You can make a decent business out of FOSS, but it's not going to be a cash cow like Windows or the old Novell.

I frankly can't judge whether Novell is executing right with SuSE. But the quality of SuSE as a distribution has been consistently high, and they have a good shot at selling to businesses, in particular in the European markets. I hope they'll make it, alongside RedHat and a completely free Debian; we need more and smaller companies, not a few behemoths. And, to me, the Linux distributions strike a good balance between compatibility and diversity.

There is no way that their move into Linux was ever going to keep them going at their past levels. That's neither surprising, nor is it Linux's fault. You can make a decent business out of FOSS, but it's not going to be a cash cow like Windows or the old Novell.

I must satisfy my inner pedant here. Market maturation doesn't imply commodization. There are plenty of examples of markets that settled down into high margin oligopolies (eg, US car market in the 60's, US banks, US brokerages, US refineries). I think there'll still be a huge, long term, high margin market for adopting computer technology to business.

Why? Did you expect that we'd not want to admit that you can't make money by selling Free Software? You can't. It's not a profit center. If you want to understand how its economics work. Look here [perens.com].

Well, aroung 1998 Eric wrote a big list of business methods for Open Source in the Cathedral and the Bazaar. History has proven most of them to be not all that effective. However, Open Source gets paid for and will continue to be paid for. How? Read the paper I linked to.

Huh, look at redhat. Don't say they just provide service contracts because that is just full of BS. The actually sell contracts on what they write (the old cygnus way, though from what I hear that business is going down but not because of open source vs closed source but from the fact new processors ISAs are being made as fast as they were once). For the processors, look at what is happening to the market, it is going to be a battle between only three processors, ARM, x86/x86_64, and PPC. This market is

Release them? As part of a coordinated tag and release programme I assume. We'll soon be seeing poor tagged IT professionals with broken wings and tracking bands for anklets arriving in flocks all round the country, perhaps stopping at a workplace near you. A pity.

First they "lose" their employees (what, you can't find them?). Then they "let them go" (as if they wanted to). Now they "release" them (from what, a prison cell?). The euphemisms just keep getting better!

One has got to believe that Novell will not remain an independent company for long. How long before CA, the grim reaper of IT, will acquire them, fire the remaining 80% and suck the legacy customers dry for maintenance revenue at inflated rates until they finally are fed to Microsoft? You heard it here first. Gartner analysts? - here's a new idea for you to pitch now that CA is your best buddy... (read the Ilumin acquisition press releases...) CA has always wanted an operating system anyway.... Cheers.

is to get rid of employees when things are not profitable, rather than try and fix the problems causing expenses to be so high. Something like job cost accounting could be used to find the products and services that cost more to support than the revenue they bring in. Then either remove the products and services that are not profitable, or use quality control to improve them so there does not need a lot of expenses in supporting them anymore.

An example of this was when Apple was bleeding billions of dollars. They got rid of unprofitable products like the Newton, scanners, printers, Pippin, etc, and improved the Macintosh quality and features, until the company started to show a profit again. Of course they also downsized, but if they did things correctly they would not have to downsize. Keep in mind that they found new markets to be profitable in like music and video files, and the iPod.

There is some risk involved in doing that, but anything in business has a certain degree of risk.

Novell ought to see if Netware is costing more to support than the revenue it brings in. Sadly there are still organizations using Netware 3.X on MS-DOS and older Windows based workstations. If Novell was smart, they'd find a product or service to offer these organizations, or allow them to upgrade the Netware 3.X servers to a version of SuSE Linux with the Netware server application designed for the older servers, and then use SAMBA to connect to Windows clients as well. Perhaps Novell could make a deal with a PC maker to bundle SuSE Linux on their workstations and servers. Maybe make a SuSE Linux based rackmount server for web, email, IM, and other functions with some PC maker.

Anyway Novell ought to see what new markets they can get into, perhaps partner up with IBM/Lotus, Oracle, Sun, or even contribute to the Mozilla Foundation.

Actually Novell was partnering with Mozilla, working on XForms. However, it seems that with the cutbacks, that's no longer the case. [beaufour.dk] (I might have misunderstood something, but that's what the blog entry seems to say.)

It is very simple really. You join Mozilla, license something like Bugzilla and then charge for customization to it to make a customized version for each organization because they all have different needs and the standard Bugzilla doesn't do all that they want it to do. Part of the contract for customization requires that the code created can be submitted back into Mozilla for use in the regular version of it that Mozilla controls.All the client organization is paying for is the labor to create the custimiz

Financial statements do not show which products and services are profitable or not, that was why job cost accounting was developed. If you took accounting classes or business management classes like I did, you'd know that. Obviously you did not.

Employees can be retrained for products and services that are profitable, rather than taking them outside and shooting them.

"Hello, welcome to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom!"..."Jim Fowler will be attaching these harmless radio collars to the employees before they are released. This will allow us to track them as they find new homes in the wild. Hopefully this information can be used by scientists to ensure a healthy and growing employee population."

"If your family is healthy and growing, you should consider purchasing insurance from Mutual of Omaha to help with all of life's little mishaps."

I can see why there is so much frustration with netware as it always seem to rely on that second OS for the frontend. Like a windows box. Netware do have alot of problems, but scaling is no where on that list.

I don't think Novell is going to have much in the way of difficulty capturing mindshare among the OSS and Linux user community. There is a few things they need to do (a better Yast, small utilities like service and slocate, etc) but the general feel of Suse 10 is that it is fairly well along to being rock solid itself. The momentum is building, and many of the community that once despised SUSe for releasing their product as source only, now feel that way about Red Hat.Enterprise managers, however, are a dif